I was fortunate to lead the business unit that was tasked to start work in Personal Systems. We ended up doing a three-fold approach: (1) We developed a PowerPC processor for high end communications systems; (2) we worked with C.D. Tam's folks in Hong Kong to develop the DragonBall processor; (3) and we started work on a code-efficient processor, MCore, that was meant to be the world's best MCU. The PowerPC processor had a bond-out option that turned it into a network processor and started the PowerQUICC processor family. DragonBall became designed into not only the Palm Pilot but also the Motorola two-way pager and such fun products as fish finders. MCore eventually lost out to ARM due, IMHO, to a focus on internal customers and wireless handsets but it was a great architecture for its intended application. I agree that C.D. Tam and others like Gary Tooker, Murray Goldman and Barry Waite were great leaders in the heyday of Motorola Semiconductor.

@Zeeglen I've always thought your EET Picture was of a MECL chip, but it's usually too small to see properly. I just copied it and pasted it into paint and it comes up as the 10116. You're obviously an ECL afficionado....

I was with MOT for a decade, a great decade it was. Rick, C.D. and Hector were part of the Motorola Semiconductor leadership, a division that eventually became Freescale. There were many other divisions including the mobile phone division that was birthed after Martin Cooper's team in the central R&D labs at Schaumburg brought forth one of the most pivotal devices (the other being the PC, I'd say). That division swallowed a couple of others and in the company split, became Motorola Mobility that passed to Google and now Lenovo. The other half, Motorola Solutions, was in the news this week, selling off its enteprise unit to Zebra. All in all, Motorola peaked at 150,000 and the surviving remainder is apparently 16,000 according to Crain's Chicago Business.

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